The Hindu Business Line : Injustice is relatively easy to bear, what stings is justice

STUNG by too much `sting', the Information and Broadcasting Ministry is said to be thinking of controlling sting operations by adding a set of dos and don'ts to the proposed Broadcasting Bill.

Sting, as the dictionary defines, is a small sharp organ of an insect or a plant, capable of injecting a painful dose of poison. The word also means a carefully planned undercover operation, which is what happened when l'affaire Tehelka surfaced, and more recently when people, rich and poor, saw the full `shakti' of the sting.

Used as slang it means a "carefully planned theft or robbery", attested from 1930, and the sense of "police undercover entrapment" was first attested in 1975, informs the Online Etymology Dictionary. Rama Lakshmi's story, "Indian TV channel finds little appetite for the naked truth", www.washingtonpost.com (April 19), points out that almost all TV news channels in India use spy cameras to expose corruption.

For instance, "Eight months back, an NDTV sting operation exposed trucks carrying foodgrains from the Food Corporation of India godown ending upin private warehouses, instead of the ration shops in the capital," as one learns from www.ndtv.com.

The report talks about the Delhi government's decision to "install GPS or global positioning systems in all the 5,000 trucks which carry grain to ration shops".

For a country of couch potatoes, the `casting couch' story about the seamier side of the glamour world, or the soft underbelly of Bollywood, is simply one more item for entertainment. But there's more to sting than meets the eye on telly, or hits one's ears on the cocktail circuit.

The day's news on a drug trail includes a report on www.abc.net.au about how Australian investigators tipped off Indonesian authorities on a trafficking operation a fortnight ago. "Armed with that information, Indonesian police were able to conduct the sting that resulted in the arrests of nine Australians in Bali."

Only a few days earlier, www.themercury.news.com.au had reported the seizure in Melbourne of "a world-record, one-tonne haul of Ecstasy" worth $250 million, in a sting operation. "Five million tablets of the designer drug destined for sale at nightclubs, bars and rave parties were found hidden in a shipment of ceramic tiles from Italy."

A months-long undercover sting operation was carried out in "a motel that authorities say served as a home base for a violent drug and prostitution ring," states an April 18 report on www.denverpost.com.

On the corruption beat around the world, www.hernandotoday.com, `Serving Hernando County, Florida', reports the arrest of a man with links to the mafia; he was nabbed as part of a nationwide sting, conducted from April 4-10, by the US Marshal's Office, called `Operation Falcon', "coinciding with National Crime Victims' Rights Week".

On `Operation Auxin' Australia's biggest child pornography sting, http://australianit. news.com.au reports that "a recently married IT expert" was caught with "what is thought to be Australia's biggest child pornography collection" — 3,50,000 pornographic images and more than 6,400 videos of girls".

The site www.kvbc.com mentions `Operation G-Sting' — on political corruption investigation — and talks of allegations that "a strip club owner paid off political heads in Las Vegas and San Diego to favour his businesses". A sting named sting, that is. Jis here may debate if stings are in public interest. A recent posting on www.alwayson-network.com titled, "The Next Generation NGO: Civil Stingers" proposes the idea: "The civil sting operation gets feed from just about any individual who has been harassed by the bureaucratic structure. The team then takes the spy-cams and CCD devices, and exposes the corruption." Sting may thus be an effective deterrent against exploitation, even if all corruption isn't going to vanish.

Bruce Hay of Harvard Law School writes in his working paper titled, "Sting operations, undercover agents, and entrapment", that sting operations are "a common but controversial law-enforcement technique — controversial because the police participate in, or even orchestrate, the very crime for which the defendant is convicted". The defining feature of a sting operation, says Hay, is that through covert means the authorities create, or facilitate, the offence.

"Normally this is done by having an undercover agent hold out some sort of bait, or opportunity, to commit a crime, and then punishing the person who takes the bait. The obvious advantage of this technique is that the crime can be caught on tape, thus eliminating many of the evidentiary difficulties of ordinary law enforcement. It is this `manufactured' quality of the offence that makes sting operations so troubling," explains the author. That's something applicable to stings by the media too.

"Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice," said H. L. Mencken. Adapting it, protagonists of sting may sing its praise thus, "Injustice is not easy to bear! So, what's just is to sting!" Yet, when sting ends up merely tickling rather than ensuring enough evidence for an open-and-shut case, its venom fails to deliver its full potency.

ZeroBase@TheHindu.co.in

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